In a series of brilliant, furious Tweets, Zoe Quinn tears apart the myth that #GamerGate has "moved beyond" harassment of women

jiggawutt: as a gamer, it’s embarassing to me to see so many other gamers treating people who disagree with them as just more enemies to be dispatched, using ever-escalating tactics. It’s not okay to disagree with someone anymore – that makes you The Other Side.

As someone who can remember people getting pretty heated over Sega vs Nintendo, Playstation vs XBox, etc. I still don’t think anybody claimed an existential struggle in those days.

strivingally: Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? The worst thing you could’ve been back then was a rabid fanboy for one company or the other. No more..

Misha: вы русский? I keep meaning to ask.

@strivingally: in relation to your earlier comment, this appears to open up the possibility of an accurate and good use of #notyourshield

pallygirl: Yeah, I guess I’m sick of hearing NotAllGamerGaters whenever the abuse and threats come up. 😛 I’m a gamer who gives a shit about feminism. Funnily enough only one side is telling me that’s some kind of conflict – the feminists aren’t saying that I’m the enemy for being a gamer. All the hate I’m feeling has been coming from the GamerHate side.

@Bina

Yes, it’s pretty obious that the movement in the german-speaking countries copypasted a lot of the talking points of their US brether, though most of those that want to be taken serious at least manage to not sound totally insane for the first half of their airtime.

The nail in the coffin was the note from the editor that talked about every story having “two sides” with the truth lying somewhere in between.

Raaaargghh! Not the golden mean! VAIYT SMASH!

Re: The Escapist.

I just got curious and read the “Publisher’s statement on #GG” linked in that diarrhoea pile of an article. Three and a half pages of “Casual gamers aren’t gamers because something about cars,” half a page on #GG that doesn’t mention women at all and one paragraph apologising for not blaming “An indie dev” (presumably Zoe Quinn) hard enough and making “A forum community (presumably 4Chan) look bad.

So… They’re trying to deflect an “Unofficial” article insulting half the population by linking to an “Official” article insulting 3/4 the population? What? Am I missing something here?

*”A forum community” – missed a quote mark. Argh, why no edit button. =P

I watched my daughter and her boyfriend laughing and gaming today.
She wants to go into tech.
She’d love to be a game designer.
This could be her getting these threats and having these conspiracy theories circulated about her one day. Either that or she’ll be driven away from her passion entirely by the men who are actively terrorizing women to push them away from gaming and game design. She won’t be the only one. This won’t stop until people stand up and stop it. They will do this to every new generation until it is stopped. This will escalate. It always does. It starts with making excuses to hate people and to hurt them. Threats are excused. We all know what comes next.

This will not die down on it’s own.

Dedicated misogynists like these will never stop being misogynists. As long as the (we are told) majority of men in the gaming community who are not misogynists do not stand up with feminists to stop this terrorism, it will continue. It will snowball. The next generation of boys will come up on these conspiracy theories. They will learn that this is how gamers treat women. They will learn that this is what men do and that it’s right and good. What do you think parents response to this will be? What do you think the word “gamer” will be associated with?

This shit is personal.

On the other hand, she might spend her whole career making games for the section of the public that doesn’t treat her like shit.

@vaiyt

The problem is that these assholes don’t give a shit who’s she’s making games for or why. To them, any woman making games period and any person making anything that doesn’t fit their narrow “triple-A hardcore” definitions are the enemy. It is not enough for them to get the games and the coverage they want; they also want to destroy any perspective that doesn’t line up with their own.

They are at war with the mere thought of diversity.

I’m with Lea. This shit is personal. These fuckers are trying to claim they’re sticking up for me, as a long-time gamer. Personally I’d rather see a hundred more articles about the growing diversification and adoption of games across different groups than see even one more site pull an article or advertiser pull their advertising because it makes a bunch of butthurt assholes uncomfortable to consider their friends might be acting like assholes.

If you are so concerned that these “journalists” (really just ad-men for the big gaming companies) are being shady, you would simply boycott the entire lot of them and be done with it like I did two decades ago.

Or, if this was really about journalistic ethics and integrity, and boycotting somehow wasn’t enough, maybe they would be targeting the journalists who are showing the bad ethics and lack of integrity? (Please note: I think that would still be a very bad thing, but at least the hypocrisy wouldn’t be quite so mind-numbingly thick). This is pretty obviously the old “no girls in the treehouse ’cause cooties” thing. Anyone who says otherwise is being wilfully obtuse.

@Bina
Thanks, and concerning info about the Mens’ Righters in Germany:
Like AVFM, there is one group – called MANNdat – that organizes much of the “activism”. There is also a blogger, Arne Hoffmann, and a forum and a few other websites (like the hilarious wiki they started). That’s basically it. However, anti-feminism has found a new home in a populist-right party that has gained some traction in the last elections. It’s called Alternative für Deutschland and it’s a strange smorgasbord of uber-neoliberal macroeconomists who claim the Euro is bad for Germany, actual remnants of the nobility of Easter Prussia who want “their” land restituted (Eastern Prussia belongs to Poland, a fact which Germany accepted in the treaties for the unification in 1990), antidemocratic libertarians (who actually want some kind of neoliberal monarchy), and radical Christian anti-abortionists (they call themselves Lebensschützer – life protectors) and homophobes (I think the French anti-gay-marriage protests were more prominent in international media; the German ones weren’t as big, but still big).

The political party most strongly connected with MANNdat, however is the Pirates’ Party. This party – which consists mainly of a platform emphasizing legal issues in the Internet – data protection, hacking, copyright – has a history with the Men’s Righters (it’s the only party in Germany that has a working group for “mens’ issues”), but has now all but disintegrated because they have a political culture on the level of gamergaters – personal insults, “uncovering” alleged moral failings of others, mobbing and harassing via twitter are rife in this party.

As you speak German, you can look for more information on these two websites:
http://rechtekerle.blogspot.com/
http://andreaskemper.wordpress.com/tag/mannerrechtler/

Concerning tactics: yeah, I’ve already decided to link here in case anyone posts more crap from the AVFM youtubers, so that it’s clear who they actually are. I probably will limit myself to posts explaining the background of these guys and mockery (At one point, one of them actually ranted about how, historically, men had sacrificed themselves “bis zur Vernichtung” – to the point of being exterminated.

@Policy of Madness
You’re right about the Gamergaters, and the Pirates’ Party I mentioned above shows the familiarity of these two groups – and their sense of entitlement. The Pirates can’t believe that people don’t vote for them, so it’s always due to someone who conspired against them. I’ll try to stay calm the next time; luckily, the blogger is persistent in posting Sarkeesian-related and feminist stuff.

@strivingally
I feel the same. I always played PC, so I stayed out of the fanboy arguments, but, having only recently returned to gaming (after my girlfriend introduced me to the wonderful world of steam and gog), I feel more than ever disconnected from these guys. However, reading Rock Paper Shotgun and some wonderful German indie blogs, I feel that I’m not the only gamer who doesn’t want anything to do with entitled assholes.

@grumpyoldnurse

They already are doing that. It’s just that their definition of being “unethical” is saying that men aren’t the center of the universe, that gaming culture has problems, that women shouldn’t be driven away by the content and other players, or the greatest sin of all: simultaneously possessing a vagina and a spine. (Incidentally, I really hate the meme of associating testicles with bravado e.g. “grow some balls”.)

@katz, sadly no, I’m not Russian :), British, wot wot and by jove (I had to google translate your question so if I’ve fluffed it I’m sorr- ahem, embarrassed).

How did you end up with a Russian handle?

I think inurashii-chan nailed it:

https://twitter.com/inurashii/status/520951829430296578

Reading the Escapist article with the statements from female game devs, and I can’t look at the comments section because the first one in the FB section is “No, you’re wrong about us, you’re hurting us.” GG people talk about how anti-GG erases women who don’t fit “their narrative” and ignore their stories, but when presented with women who are telling them that GG scares them, they brush it off and make it all about how unfairly maligned GG is. The cognitive dissonance is really disturbing to me, and it just keeps getting worse. I shouldn’t have to remind a GGer to black out personal information of one of their supporters, and being met with yet another justification for not blacking it out is doubly worrying.

Oh yeah, and claiming people were killed because of Zoe Quinn? Seriously? The only person who might end up dead is she herself. These melodrama llamas really need to get a life, collectively.

The logic there is so amazing.

1) The harassment campaigns against women are making gamers look bad.
2) This is the women’s fault. After all, if they weren’t being harassed, gamers wouldn’t look bad for harassing them.
3) It’s making gamers look so bad, in fact, that employers may become reluctant to hire people who identify as gamers. Or they could fire gamer employees who use their work hours to harass women, which is so unfair!
4) Someday this hypothetical anti-gamer discrimination will get so bad that gamers will be unable to get jobs and will STARVE TO DEATH BY THE MILLIONS.
5) This imaginary discrimination is a much more serious problem than the actual discrimination, hate campaigns and death threats going on in the gaming world right now. After all, the imaginary discrimination affects men.

they could fire gamer employees who use their work hours to harass women, which is so unfair!

FFS!!! I have an coworker who got officially reprimanded for checking zer FaceBook on a company computer! Somebody, Call the WAAAAAAAAmbulace!

I’m still lying low on Twitter (I was already), but I’m keeping track of the situation as best I can and preparing for when the time comes to do battle (and I’m following too). I’ve had some skirmishes with the #tcot faction before, but nothing this big yet (I merely got blocked by Glenn Beck, Scott Baio, and a few others).

Re “two sides”: that strikes me as an all too familiar #msmfail conservative meme by which establishment media outlets declare themselves “centrist” (read: not Fox News) while still trying to force the “Overton window” as far right as they can, so I’m not surprised the GG reactionaries are latching onto it so hard.

@Bernardo: Speaking of reactionary trends originating in America, the Alternative für Deutschland party looks like a clone of the “TEA Party” faction of our Republican Party (that “TEA” is a pun on the Boston Tea Party and stands for “Taxed Enough Already”). And I’m somewhat familiar with its neoliberal-monarchist faction, since I’ve read some of their posts during my occasional sojourns onto the US libertarian sites (e.g. Hans-Hermann Hoppe on LewRockwell.com). No doubt they have links to the UK Independence Party too, being both Euroskeptic and reactionary.

@Shaenon Thanks for unravelling that particular piece of bizarre troll logic, because I couldn’t make sense of it at all. ZOE QUINN KILLED IMAGINARY GAMERS! SOMEHOW!

Not sure if this article from the Atlantic was posted here before (sorry if so), doesn’t deal with GG, but does deal with rampant online misogyny and harassment of women:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-unsafety-net-how-social-media-turned-against-women/381261/

As for GG, let’s pretend for a moment that hypothetically GG wasn’t just another opportunity for bitter internet neckbeards to do Comment Section Activism and lash out at women, social justice bloggers, “cultural marxists” and whatever other scary boogeymen keep mangry neckbeards awake at night. Let’s say that GG was really was just about integrity in video gaming journalism.

Then it would still just be about integrity in video gaming journalism, which in the grand scheme of things is not exactly this earth shattering scandal. A bunch of gamers reacting to corruption in gaming journalism like it’s the start of WWIII would be ridiculous and over the top even if it weren’t for the misogyny. But, of course, it’s always been mostly about the misogyny and the angry manbabies upset that the mean women and social justice bloggers are taking “their” games away from them.

And how dare those women and social justice types ruin video games by forcing diversity into a form of media that should be the rightful domain of white, heterosexual men. And aliens. And dragons. And wizards. And zombies. And talking plants.

What I find most shocking about the whole GamerGate thing is that the “ethics in journalism” claims are so blatantly untrue. I sort of wonder if GGer’s have managed to lie to themselves enough times for it to be true? Even when they try to talk about journalists, they can’t go more than a few sentences before they start frothing about “social justice warriors” trying to take away their video games.

The true is, they don’t understand that people are allowed to talk about video games however they please. I have seen grown men cry that their “freedom of speech” is being violated because women are allowed to say things they don’t like. They honestly believe that women need to be silenced to protect free expression. It is mind boggling.

And then the cries of “there are women in GG!!!1!11” As if that is some shield against being criticized for their open misogyny. Yes, dear, there are lots of women in the world that get off on abusing other women just as much as you do. What is your point?

What can I do for zoe quinn?

Even when they try to talk about journalists, they can’t go more than a few sentences before they start frothing about “social justice warriors” trying to take away their video games.

This is the part that completely floors me. No matter who tries to argue with me that this isn’t about hating on women or SJWs, it only takes a few sentences for them to get to why Anita Sarkeesian is evil for trying to take away their games (SHE’S NOT) or how Zoe Quinn tried to destroy vidya games jernlizm (SHE DIDN’T) or why Leigh Alexander is the real bigot for saying a lot of gamers are sexist jerks (THEY ARE).

If it were really about journalism, it wouldn’t be so damn easy to scratch the surface of one of these tools and find the resentment against The Other brewing underneath.

@repentantphonebooth:

Here’s what you can do.

Like AVFM, there is one group – called MANNdat – that organizes much of the “activism”. There is also a blogger, Arne Hoffmann, and a forum and a few other websites (like the hilarious wiki they started). That’s basically it. However, anti-feminism has found a new home in a populist-right party that has gained some traction in the last elections. It’s called Alternative für Deutschland and it’s a strange smorgasbord of uber-neoliberal macroeconomists who claim the Euro is bad for Germany, actual remnants of the nobility of Easter Prussia who want “their” land restituted (Eastern Prussia belongs to Poland, a fact which Germany accepted in the treaties for the unification in 1990), antidemocratic libertarians (who actually want some kind of neoliberal monarchy), and radical Christian anti-abortionists (they call themselves Lebensschützer – life protectors) and homophobes (I think the French anti-gay-marriage protests were more prominent in international media; the German ones weren’t as big, but still big).

The political party most strongly connected with MANNdat, however is the Pirates’ Party. This party – which consists mainly of a platform emphasizing legal issues in the Internet – data protection, hacking, copyright – has a history with the Men’s Righters (it’s the only party in Germany that has a working group for “mens’ issues”), but has now all but disintegrated because they have a political culture on the level of gamergaters – personal insults, “uncovering” alleged moral failings of others, mobbing and harassing via twitter are rife in this party.

Crap, how disappointing that the Pirate Party gives these douchebros any space at all. It’s hardly as if German men are the least bit oppressed; if anything, they’re even more sexist than the average anglo. (And way more entitled, too, if the number of brothels is any indication.) Oh well, if they’re going to go that route, it’s little wonder they’re barely electable. Throwing half the German population under the bus for the sake of cultivating a few geeky boys’ votes will get you that, eh? And German women are every bit as internet-savvy as anyone can be, so that’s another major strike against them. If they’re going to act as though politics is one big flame war, it serves them right. Women want the online world to be safer for them everywhere, and if these guys are too busy fighting amongst themselves (AND abusing women online!) to make it so, they deserve to lose.

I’m going to save those links for when my head is up to it; may translate and mock the worst of it on my blog later. Thanks a lot!

PS: Wow, they are a bunch of right-wing dingbats, aren’t they.

4) Someday this hypothetical anti-gamer discrimination will get so bad that gamers will be unable to get jobs and will STARVE TO DEATH BY THE MILLIONS.

Or explode in a cloud of Cheeto dust, oh noes!

(Dear Lord. This will put the manufacturers of Cheetos out of business, too. MISANDRY!)

thanks strivingally!! I spent some time on the cracked site talking to commenters about why the gamergate nonsense is exactly that. you don’t harass a person and then try and take the moral high ground. No one will ever take you seriously.

RE: “But they don’t seem like bad people…”

Well, yeah, of course they’ll seem that way – if you interact with them enough.

When I was a teenager, I spent years telling myself that all the racist and sexist things my friends said was just verbal horseplay. The reality was that they were just racists and sexists – I just wanted to justify interacting with them at all. The ideas someone expresses cannot be separated from who they are, in my opinion. We often tell ourselves otherwise because many guilt others with false proclamations of “open-mindedness” whenever they take issue with someone else’s opinions. ‘Cause, hey, they’re just “opinions”…which is still based around how others should be treated (and not for the better).

“Civility” has become something of a smoke-screen in recent years for bigots and other ignoramuses to express themselves openly, while nonetheless stifling any criticism towards them. They care more about their “right” to say and do whatever they please, reducing all views on an issue to “just an opinion” – as if it is all entirely hypothetical and part of some fucked-up rhetorical game.

RE: False Equivalence

I’ve had people say that Gjoni was totally right just ’cause, only to then turn around and say “but both sides are at fault!” It’s a way to look impartial by not being impartial at all. Like demanding facts, only to then claim any evidence given “doesn’t count”.

Fuck, someone on my friend’s list posted a Christina Hoff Sommers article from TIME and I brought up why one should not believe her – which involved statistics from the CDC, FBI, and DoJ – wherein he dismisses it all as “differing opinion.” Nevermind her article was op-ed and that she never brings up a single argument that isn’t backed-up by…another op-ed piece. I bring up her political biases and that she works for the American Enterprise Institute. It didn’t matter, of course, because he seemed determined to believe her while disingenuously claiming he was being totally “objective”.

@ NickNameNick – I hate it when people can’t think, and then try and blame you for their short comings!

“Civility” has become something of a smoke-screen in recent years for bigots and other ignoramuses to express themselves openly, while nonetheless stifling any criticism towards them. They care more about their “right” to say and do whatever they please, reducing all views on an issue to “just an opinion” – as if it is all entirely hypothetical and part of some fucked-up rhetorical game.

QFgoddamnT.

This is what pisses me off about flibbertigibbertarians, in a nutshell. They’re all “freedom for me, but none for thee”. And if you call them on their hypocrisy, they bawl about how uncivil and mean you are to them. And then they turn around and start swinging below the belt again.

At this point i want to cover most of the gaters in angry hornets

Crap, how disappointing that the Pirate Party gives these douchebros any space at all.

I’m not surprised at all. Political movements like the Piratpartiet are notorious for being led by young, privileged men. Julian Assange, wikileaks guy and probable rapist, actually made a comment in favor of GamerGate. So has Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer, who has become, since his prison time, a LITERAL NAZI. Both men are celebrated internet freedom heroes. Both are incredibly privileged.

It’s like atheism. I may wish I could throw my weight behind this stuff as a movement, but the people driving those movements make me sick.

So that’s their celebrity support, a rapist and a Nazi? Good show, guys, we’re all very impressed.

oh, c’mon, they have more celebrity support than that! Like Adam Baldwin, conspiracy theorist neoconservative Firefly actor. And Milo Yiannopoulos, gay-yet-homophobic Breitbart hack. And Christina Hoff Sommers, professional fake feminist antifeminist.

Basically it’s a far-right bigotry parade.

I love how none of these people are gamers, but that’s OK because they hate ladies just like all the other assholes.

@cassandrakitty:

Anita Sarkeesian criticising narrative themes and the treatment of women in videogames (which is a goddamned textual analysis and doesn’t require one to be an expert) is bullshit because she’s not a gamer, but Milo, CHS, et al. joining in on the GG side is perfectly fine and welcome.

Because Reasons. Also JERNLIZTIC INTERGITY.

(personally I would’ve thought the sight of a bunch of washed-up right wing hacks glomming onto their cause would’ve given some pause to anybody who actually cared about journalistic ethics, it seems I was mistaken)

It’s like being lapped while you’re running track. They’re so super progressive and ahead of the curve (lolbullshit) that the establishment seems to have caught right up to them. How could that have happened? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s episode of “As The Asshole Turns”.

I glanced through Julian Assange’s comments about it since I never saw him pop up on any of the Twitter streams I follow. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t know jack shit about the movement and appears to just be co-opting their anger at “censorship” for his own unrelated political reasons… so exactly like all the other celebrities!

Also, I really hate how the rape allegation against him was handled. I have no doubt he could very well be guilty and his victims deserve justice, but the timing of it (ten days before the heavily-hyped cable leak) and the United States’ interest in pressing charges against him was basically begging for every conspiracy theorist and general asshole to immediately shout “FAKE!” It’s bad for everyone and especially his victims, who you know would be immediately doxxed and have to live in fear for the rest of their lives if he ever ends up in court.

I’ve finished the first draft of my own anti-GG post, but I’m going to take my good time polishing it up because I want to make sure I state my point with absolute clarity and hella sting, and also because I need to prepare for the backlash (and I want my novel as close to edited as possible by then, since it’s a Molotov cocktail in itself).

I should have said this in my first post, but I’m damn glad that Zoe keeps on fighting. She’s become an inspiration to me.

the cries of “there are women in GG!!!1!11″

There’s been women fighting against women’s rights since there’s been women fighting for women’s rights. I may be cynical, but I’m betting most of those “women in GG” are our old “friends” the Honey Badger FemRAs.

Crap, how disappointing that the Pirate Party gives these douchebros any space at all.

So they’ve gone the way of the US Libertarians after all. Just as well I didn’t join either party (there’s a tiny little Pirate Party branch in Washington state, or at least was) and remained independent…

a Christina Hoff Sommers article from TIME

And there’s the trifecta! I knew it! *facepalm* #msmfail

Julian Assange, wikileaks guy and probable rapist, actually made a comment in favor of GamerGate.

There goes the last of my respect for the guy. Yet another of my heroes turns villain… *takes out sledgehammer, smashes pedestal*

It’s like atheism.

Reading so much facepalm-worthy tripe from the likes of Richard Dawkins convinced me that though they may be secular, they sure as hell ain’t humanists.

So that’s their celebrity support, a rapist and a Nazi? Good show, guys, we’re all very impressed.

And some right-wing Hollywood actors. No A-listers though. Though if Fox News jumps on the bandwagon, I’ll be, uh, impressed. Especially if they bring Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers on Fox & Friends.

@katz, it’s a shortened nick of my real/meatspace name. I was daft enough to not even know it was Russian until recently (someone brought up Misha Collins and things went from there). Kinda cool it is, though 🙂

No doubt they have links to the UK Independence Party too, being both Euroskeptic and reactionary.

Ye gads, not Ukip, Anything but Ukip. Their increasing popularity is everyone’s (least) favourite headache at the moment.

Especially if they bring Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers on Fox & Friends.

Oooh, had a sudden shivery, shuddery feeling. As though someone had just misandered over my grave…

I spoke up under the Gamergate hashtag on Twitter again – we’ll see where it goes today. Who’s doing the same?

I am, have been for weeks. When I do I get some abuse, and some apologetics. One dude had a meltdown: I didn’t see it because I’d already blocked him, but the people engaging him in my stream made it plain the veneer peeled away.

. They’re quite clear that they neither have any obligation to criticise those who are obsessed with hating women, nor any motivation to abandon #GamerGate to the haters and make a new tag specifically addressing corruption.

The dude who lost his shit explicitly said that: Made it clear the asshole and haters were a feature, not a bug.

2) What would you recommend as a good tactic to a) uncover these guys’ real driving ideology and b) refute their “arguments” without exhausting oneself and feeling slightly dirty?

Treat them as if they were honeset actors: ask pointed questions of clarification. This usually induces meltdown; thus showing them for what they are.

@Bina
The links actually lead you to the website of a sociologist who has done the most work analysing and fighting MANNdat. If you want to look at material for mockery, go to:
http://www.wgvdl.com/ (especially their forum, where all these asshats unite to whine)
http://genderama.blogspot.de/ (Arne Hoffmann’s blog)
http://manndat.de/

@Dennis_Jernberg
Yes, the AfD is basically Tea Party ideology mixed with some of the more unsavoury flavors of German politics. They negotiated with UKIP to work together in the European Parliament, but the more classically liberal (and less nationalist) parts of AfD are against it. Nevertheless, these are losing ground to the far right in the party.

Re: Pirate Party
The problems were very visible from the beginning, at least in Germany. Some from the progressive left hoped it would become better and entered to influence the party from within, but recently, the last lefties have left the party in a widely publicized move. The party handled poorly several cases of Neonazis trying to hijack their “freedom of speech” platform to argue against the illegality of Holocaust denial in Germany. One of its central ideas, “Liquid Democracy” (basically, organizing democratic discourse, plebiscites and elections via social media) fell apart after it became clear to everyone how the party members themselves used Twitter for airing dirty laundry and harassing other members who disagreed on whatever point (of course, particularly feminists). Where they were elected (locally), they showed their incompetence in all political fields outside of their speciality. The Mens’ Rights connection didn’t help.

Re: Gamergate
It’s simply ridiculous to claim this is about corruption in the gaming media. Gamergate exploded while the gamescom was happening in Germany, one of the biggest international trade shows. Journalists from mainstream gaming magazines were brought to the event with buses paid for by the largest companies, who shuffled the journalists to exclusive previews of 30 sec. trailers to promote their newest crap FPS (You know the drill: pre-rendered “live game footage” and so on). The Germany army actually had a recruiting stand there. No one on Gamergate talks about the multifaceted connections between AAA companies and the arms manufacturers, ranging from giving publicity to the newest guns to studios using their game engines to produce military simulators for the army (Bohemia Interactive, the guys behind Arma and DayZ, actually have a sister studio just for that purpose. They share the engine). There is a journalist in Germany who researches this stuff. He has around 7 000 views on YouTube.

Oh sweet holy gibbering fuck. These asshats are no longer mockable. Poe’s Law has disappeared into a vortex of impossibly dense compressed lack-of-self-awareness.

https://twitter.com/TheQuinnspiracy/status/521162129173643264

Ummm. Wow. Just wow. Conspiracy theories so illogical I’m pretty sure Alex Jones and Glenn Beck are going “Hang on, isn’t that a little far-fetched?”

Heh … I’m old enough that the name Misha will always bring to mind one image – the 1980 Moscow Olympics mascot.

http://georgesjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/olympic_lore_moscow_1980_mischa_the_bear_mascot.jpg